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Dimitrije Beljanski - Piano Sonata


DMT

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This is my first sonata, it has two movements. In first, I played with the esthetic of minimalism, and in the second I clashed few different styles in rondo-like form to get some comic but still captivating effect. Feel free to give any comment, advice, suggestion :)

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1. I'm struggling to see the minimalism, unless you have a different definition of it than I do. I think of Reich, primarily, but yours develops too much to be a piece primarily devoted to aestheticism rather than post-modernism. Even the Bb minor part adds within itself, but definitely not on itself, which is a key component of it. Music concrete is a good example. 
Your sonata form is forced. Look into the neoclassical definition of sonata form and you'll get lots of leeway, but even then a structure is important. Clearly your piece is playable, but it does the opposite of a meditation session and leaves me wanting more since so many things go nowhere here.

2. The form here is obscure? It almost works as rounded binary, but I don't hear a third A for rondo, and don't hear an extensive A' for sonata. 
How come you don't use beams in some of your triple meter passages? You sometimes do and sometimes don't and I don't really see a different between them.
In your performance at 140, you really didn't start at ppp. Which version of the piece is correct.
I definitely got a clash of styles. I don't know what to say about it, since it feels a bit unjustified considering it's not really done coherently, especially when the free atonality comes in, but for these purposes I think it's fine.

Cheers!

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My take is slightly different, Dimitreje.  Consider me good cop as opposed to Monarcheon's bad cop. Yes, the style and music is all over the place. So what? It doesn't conform to strict formalities. So what? Neither did mine when I started out. It still doesn't! What I hear from you is a composer who is working things out little by little. I think that it's great that you even wrote this down, which is more than I ever did.

People are always going to tell you things like, this is not minimalism.  This is not a sonata. You will make it what you make it when you make it.

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Well, definitely minimalism of Reich, more like minimalism of Satie, of course, from the post-modernist view on that, and it is much more close to sonata, because it develops under those rules but not entirely. I kept the aspect of two themes. In first theme I kept same harmonic progressions, and changed the parameters as slow as possible.(rhythmically it gets from whole notes to eights notes in the second theme very slowly). In the development, I did the opposite of real development, I just took one motif and repeated 6 times (influence from minimalism, or even pop music), with just increasing dynamics (and got rhythmically more complex).

Second part is obscure because it is purposely comical. Title on Serbian is "Rondo koji to nije" which translates to "Rondo which isn't rondo", and it lacks real form of ABACABA, it goes more like this A (first page) B ( Waltz) A (Just one bar with the main theme) C (Jazzy part), and then again A', than B' and closes with just one bar of the main theme.

Sheet is the first version of the sonata, so music on the youtube is what is the right, and what it should sound. Also, that is the reason of the beams, and other strange writings solutions.

 

 

Thank you all for the listening to my piece, and to your views of that. I will keep al of that in mind when composing my next piece.

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